Cleaving, the second book from Julie Powell, is radically different than the first. Julie and Julia was a phenomenon, recently made into a movie with Amy Adams and Meryl Streep, no less. In it, Powell uses the anchor of cooking through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking to find her footing in life. It was a cute idea at the right time and the story of her love of husband Eric combined with the foodie zeitgeist formed to produce a hit.

Cleaving, however, has none of the romance that made Powell so popular. It’s anti-romantic. This book pivots on an extended metaphor comparing butchery to relationship estrangement where the food feels like an aside to the journal-like logging of Powell’s grating inner turmoil. It’s as if she was deliberately trying to hack apart her formula.

The first line turns out to be oddly apropos, once you get through the book: “This is really not what it looks like.” Despite the bright and cheery colors of the cover, inside is a story of butchery and betrayal. We follow Powell through her butchery apprenticeship, which she is using to weave violent comparisons to being left by her lover. She goes through carpal tunnel, exhaustion, countless bottles of red wine and Buenos Aires, seemingly to avoid proximity to both her husband and the mysterious “D.” It’s such a radical departure from the lovey-dovey image she projected previously, that her fans are sure to be confused. Ms. Powell may have been aware of that, so the tone is at turns distant and defensive.

There are recipes inserted into the story, dishes that deal with whatever is happening in the plot at the time. The delivery is clunky and they seem like a desperate cling to the cooking theme. The mastery of butchery is obscured by the huge lens Powell has focused on her internal monologue. Instead of illuminating the truly interesting things around her (the charming cast of the butcher shop and later exotic world travels), Powell places the reader in the judgment seat with her self-absorbed harping. It is a difficult book to read because one cannot really help but psychoanalyze her, due to the provoking tone, which invites it. The last thing you want in a memoir is a veiled plea for forgiveness and understanding.

As Powell learns the art of butchery, she gives detailed descriptions of cutting up animals, enough to put off the squeamish and vegetarians alike. Her strength lies in description, those moments when she is outside of herself. In her self-reflective narrative, which dominates the book, she wanders into amateur writing traps like word repetition. Her continued use of the same phrases dampens the emotional punch. She spends too little time on the exploits of her cohorts at the butcher shop and far too much time with bloggish diary-like depictions of her love triangle.

The chapter titles are too cutesy, but the illustrations accompanying them are compelling. The readers’ attention wanders because there’s really not much of a story here; I found my eyes racing over the text. Powell is sometimes pompous, rockets to guilt-ridden, makes a stop in self-pitying. One must give her credit for being brutally honest, whether she’s watching a goat’s throat get slit or reporting explicit trysts, but it’s amazing how boring the drama can get.

The pop culture references largely fall flat. At one point, watching a cow dispense of its afterbirth, she quips, “She must be a Tom Cruise fan.” Collective groan. When Powell told the story of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to a Maasi village, I left the imprint of my cringe on the page. The thing is, this reviewer would seem to be her target audience. I love Buffy, I know the Decemberists song she’s talking about when she references a stevedore, and I’m a hopeless romantic. It just didn’t resonate with me, familiarity aside. Powell wants to come off like Buffy or Faith, but she sounds more like Dawn.

The comparison of dismantling animals and severing relationships extends through the whole book and becomes a bit much. What could have been poignant (and does have its moments) becomes complete overkill. Powell compares blood sausage to her lover’s penis in one passage, which is a thought that she shouldn’t have ever voiced, much less written down. Scouring my notes, I see that where she puts forth her theory about Jack the Ripper and his butchery, I simply wrote “poppycock.”

In an interview included with her press materials, Powell answers the customary question of “what’s next?” with “I’d like to get into fiction…we shall see!” I think both Julie Powell and her readers need a break from Julie Powell. The smartest thing she could do after this debacle is try her hand at fiction. It’s as if all this self-indulgent navel gazing was a writing exercise. Powell is not a terrible writer; she just needs to be removed from her own scrutiny. I hope it’s a build-up to some fiction of startling depth that will surprise us all. It’s just a shame — rarely is practice made so public.